It Does Have to Be Every Day

March 10, 2022

I wrote a couple weeks ago about how It Doesnā€™t Have to Be Every Day.

But there are a lot of times when doing something every day is immensely helpful. It catalyzes me to do things that I otherwise wouldnā€™t find time to do.

For example: this blog. If I didnā€™t keep a streak of writing a blog post every day, I probably wouldnā€™t do it nearly as often. Even though itā€™s something that I want to do (and Iā€™m always glad afterwards that I have a backlog of blog posts), I need a daily cadence in order to keep me on track. Iā€™m not sure how long I can keep this pace up, but itā€™s held so far.

Or my daily journal entry since December 2019: at this point, what keeps me motivated for doing that is that I canā€™t bear having a gap in the entries. The guilt of not doing it pushes me to keep up that habit, and Iā€™m immensely happy looking back that Iā€™ve kept it up.

Or lastly, keeping up with studying my flashcards for Chinese class bit by bit every day. If I told myself that Iā€™d study the flashcards ā€œwhenever I have timeā€, I wouldnā€™t do it much at all. But by creating a daily recurring task for it, I somehow find time to do it every day. I work it into my routine by pressure.

Thereā€™s of course a danger that adding too many things to the daily routine will become overwhelming. In a way, I start every day being behind on work: even if I finished everything yesterday, new tasks have reappeared overnight.

But for now, itā€™s going okay. As long as I donā€™t give too many things every day status, itā€™s a neat trick to get my brain to keep up habits.

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